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Soon-to-be-drunk coeds litter Third Avenue. I weave through them, feeling a disdain that’s almost palpable. For they can do something I can’t. They can freely (ab)use their livers while mine remains stalely untouched. It’s been over seven months. As I approach my room, I get a lump in my throat. I know the tears are only seconds away. Why am I crying? Perhaps I’m in mourning. Mourning for the reckless abandonment that used to govern my life.
Now my life is full of structure, routine, and most importantly, constraint. It was a trade-off I was forced to make, a trade-off I’m willing to accept (most days), but it does not ward off a painful longing that hits me especially strongly on weekend nights. I could do it, though. I could pick up where I left off, start up again with the life I once had. Willingly submit myself to the perpetual hangover and anxiety, the youthful recklessness. It would be so easy—I would just have to walk one avenue south and I could have my pick of my next nervous breakdown. A breakdown that comes in a variety of people, places, and things: rum, whiskey, the various assortments of vodka, mixed drinks with semi-clever names, darkened bars and pubs made solely for awkward sexual conversation, a pack-a-day habit, and endless nights of crying and wishing that it could end, that I could make it end.
They say the first thing to do is to admit you have a problem. But I’m not there. I’m about three jumps, a hop, and a skip away from admission. I am buried in the abyss that is recognition, the loneliness of a disease I’m barely old enough to legally suffer. I could go to meetings, sit around with people three times my age who offer conventional wisdom between coffee breaks, unsolicited monologues designed to give inspiration but that really make me feel tiny, stupid and young, not nearly as fucked up as I’d like to be. I could get a hobby, immerse myself in a banal project of self-improvement, take up knitting, quit smoking and be a better person. Whatever that means.
No, I’m not going to stop smoking. Every cigarette is a silent protest, a signal that I’m still alive and that there’s a just a bit more recklessness left inside me. The date of my last drink is embedded in my memory. April 16, 2012. Like the date I lost my virginity, ex-boyfriends’ birthdays, and the date I got into college, this date has become immortalized in my mind; it’s grown into a legend. My memory plays tricks on me. It glorifies things, makes them larger than life, fills the memory with a false glow; facts are edged out, feelings are swapped. It’s an emotional pretense. The last drink was divided into two margaritas. One mine, one not mine. I was notorious for finishing other people’s drinks. I was an Equal Opportunity Drunk: no drink was too strong, no drink was finite, size did not matter—the only thing that mattered was my tenacity in self-destruction. My need for self-destruction took a front seat to everything. My health, my sanity, and my will to live all sat back while my self-destruction drove me to a collapse. They say that everyone has a different place of starting, that the origins of recovery are rooted in your own personal rock bottom. My rock bottom occurred March 30, 2012. It was a Friday.
I had left New York in a huff; the air was still lightly frosted in a winter chill. I was severely underweight. My body was frail, my spirits were low—about two weeks prior, my “ex-boyfriend” had broken up with me over text in such a cavalier manner that I felt like I had been erased from the world. As if I were in an Etch-A-Sketch and someone shook it ‘til I was gone. I had left New York for Connecticut. Gone to visit a friend. It was all very hurried and unplanned. I wanted to leave myself behind, so I left New York; it worked for a few hours until I finally caught up with myself. After I sat through my friend’s play, she took me to a cast party. The alcohol was expensive and the people were stuffy. People drank—mostly sipped—while conversing about the most pedestrian of topics. It was at a two-story house on campus supposedly for a traveling a capella group. Spread out across the kitchen counter were red Solo cups, the college staple, sodas to serve as chasers, and massive amounts of alcohol.
My eyes perked up. I had found my solace, if only temporarily. I picked up a red cup and drank two shots. My friend urged me to not fill the cups so high, that what I was pouring was more than a shot. And she was right: what I was pouring was an accelerant to a fire that had already started. We went upstairs. There was music playing. Cast members from the play were still in their makeup. It was like my own private theatre of misery and the house was completely full. I found a beer in a refrigerator. I downed it. From the moment the party began to the moment I hit rock bottom, I was on autopilot, subservient to the thoughts in my head. The thoughts played like a broken record: recycled sayings from my parents, insults from ex-boyfriends, the sing-songy chants of supposedly harmless teasing from grade school, middle school and high school.
They swirled around in my head, getting louder and louder. The only way to drown them out was to drink. So I drank and drank and drank. Eventually, I went back downstairs and made myself another “shot,” which was a cup full of vodka filled to the rim, gulped down in a matter of seconds. I found a bottle of wine. I drank from the bottle. Germs were the last thing I was thinking of. I drank another beer. And my memory stops here. From what I was told, a few more drinks went down my throat; all-in-all it was nearly a dozen drinks in an hour. The following hours I spent lying on cold linoleum passing in and out of consciousness, occasionally throwing up. Even though I was black-out drunk, I could feel myself half-celebrating for creating such a mess and causing myself such agony. Through my drunken stupor, I could feel self-loathing radiating from my body. I was hot and cold, passed out, and near what I hoped was death. It turns out what I was nearing was the hospital.
I woke up still fully clothed in a hospital in Connecticut. It was around 7 a.m. I had briefly forgotten that I was in Connecticut. They explained to me the events of the night prior and handed me some literature on alcoholism and sent me on my way. I took a cab back to campus. I quietly sobbed while sitting in the back of the cab. When my tears dried, I was starting to feel the worst hangover of my life. It was quickly settling in. Two weeks later, I’d quit drinking. My last drink would leave me sick and unable to walk.
Now, nearly three months out of rehab, plump and sober, I still feel an ache in my heart at the sight of drunken individuals; occasionally my head buzzes too loudly with the same old routine of self-loathing and self-deprecation, but the silver lining to this tribulation is that, due to my recent lifestyle changes, I’ve ensured for myself a long, long life. And all of this—this mistreatment of my body, this existential crisis and this state of being young, senseless and rash—will be a footnote, an ancillary detail that only informs but does not define.
About Geraldine Inoa
Geraldine Inoa is a playwright who lives in Brooklyn, New York. When she was sixteen, Virginia Woolf came to her as she was reading Mrs. Dalloway, and informed her of her calling, announcing her fate to become a writer. Since then, she is a weaver of words and emotions; one who discloses the human condition honestly; one who uncovers love and bereavement though language; one who dwells within her own head; and one who, as did Mrs. Woolf, lives in obligation to her pen.
